Stanley Twardowicz at Mitchell Algus - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

There is no greater reminder of the fickleness of art-wood consensus than a flip end art magazines of decades past. Celebrated artists have vanished from view, while hindsight assigns pivotal characters to artists who received virtually no attention at the time.

Not easy in mind merely to reminisce, Mitchell Algus tracks down artists who have disappeared from sight and gives them present to views Stanley Twardowicz is one of his finds -- an Op artist whose work was well regarded in the late '50 and '60 who was featured upon the cover of this magazine in 1958 and who enumerateed Franz Kline, Jules Olitski and Jack Kerouac among his shut trends. Now in his 80 he left of recent origin York to live and teach upon Long island in 1956 and, after his of recent origin York gallery, Peridot, closed in the easy '70 essentially dropp from sight.

Twardowicz did not stop painting, however. Remov from the fray, his paintings proffer a time capsule of relate tos which no longer occupy the center of artistic discourse. on the contrary because the works have not been seen publicly until now, they also breathe of recent origin life into ideas we musing we knew too well. Twardowicz's primary be of importance to is opticality, and, like Olitski, he mov in the late '60 from staining his canvases to spraying them. An earlier exhibition at Algus highlighted these works, which consist of glowing ovals of sprayed paint which exploit the peculiar operations of peripheral vision. They proffer unexpected combinations of colors -- a painting with a sunspotlike concentration of golden in the center fans on the outside into rings which are pink, then cerulean green and finally white. The color logic turn rounds out to be physiological as well as esthetic. When individual stares fixedly at the fulvid center, an optical illusion appears as the color in the external rings appears to melt away into a impressible white.

This exhibition featured new works. Twardowicz has moved to hard-edged compositions, on the contrary his interest in opticality remains. Each lengthy horizontal canvas is divided into sum of two units unequal blocks of color. In individual work, a smaller dark square of navy sky-colored sits next to a drawn out rectangle of lighter blue. In another the colors are dark purple and brown; in still another they are slate gray and purple

Again the point is the optical events that occur when the colors play not on each other. Although there are single two solid colors in a given painting, the colors appear to change in intensity as they point aimed at up against each other. And ofttimes an odd afterimage causes a tiny line of complementary color to appear along the cutting sides of the canvas, which are in fact continuous with the color blocks

In an age given to quick-change artists, Twardowicz reminds us of the virtues of singularity of focus. He demonstrates that the committed artist can discover of recent origin and continually interesting permutations within the simplest of ideas.

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